Robert Crews

CREWS HAD NOT WORKED LONG BEFORE HE had to quit and go into the woods and vomit most of what he had eaten. He had no way of knowing for sure, but he was convinced that the trouble was not with the quality of the minnows but rather with the quantity he had eaten. He had gorged on too many, too fast, swallowing whole more than he had masticated thoroughly. So finally, after all his efforts, there would be no nourishment in his body.

The experience so dispirited him that he went to bed even before twilight came, but not before providing himself with a fresh mattress of fragrant, springy pine boughs. This looked better than it felt, but he had to raise himself above the damp ground and at the moment could not come up with an alternative. He eventually squirmed into a position in which no sharp end of branch probed any sensitive place on his person if he remained motionless in sleep. Getting warm, however, was another matter and without reference to the actual temperature. The sun had shone all day and the air was probably warmer now than it had been at noon. The heat he craved was that of an enveloping cover, a blanket, a great big thick wool blanket in which to mummify the entire body from toe to crown, and even keep all one’s exhalations until it was so deliciously, suffocatingly hot inside that, at the instant before asphyxiation, you saved your life only by a quick thrust of the index finger up into the outer world.

The second night in his sturdy new abode was a disaster. For the first time he was conscious of the nighttime sounds of the wild, which until now—because he had previously slept through the hours of darkness—he had ignorantly believed silent. Whereas this night was all but clamorous, with murmurs, siftings, crashes in the woods; splashes from the pond and drippings and sighs; and from overhead and at a distance and nearby and at hand and almost out of earshot what could be called sobs, groans, moans, yells, shouts of rage, screams of joy. Reason told you they were not really such. There was a range of human emotions of which nature surely did not partake. But the sounds of pain could not be mistaken. Living creatures did not go unprotestingly between the jaws of others even though God had constructed them for that purpose. There were squeals and screeches and violent agitations of limbs, tails, wings. There was insane laughter (the legendary loon?), what could have been a roar, what was undoubtedly a sequence of howls, and from something that was probably dying came ever fainter bleatings.

To which din Crews was soon to add his own contribution. Until now he had taken little more note of insects (except in the case of the larvae tried as bait) than he did when at home, but suddenly they asserted their claim for his attention. He felt crawled on by tiny things with multitudinous limbs, which often, when he went to arrest their progress, turned out to be inanimate fragments of evergreen bough, manifestly incapable of independent movement, yet which began again to move vigorously as soon as he probed elsewhere. There were squirming beings in the thick of his scalp, in his facial and body hair, and in the farthest toes of his socks, none of which he could find when he went there. Little creatures strolled across his forehead and nose with the same impunity. They were gone before his hand reached them. He slapped himself violently, and whenever he did so, the other sounds of the night were instantly stilled. Could the entire world around him know, by this noise alone, that he alone was alien?

Then the aggressors went too far. He was finally stung by a mosquito so voracious that it stayed at his blood till it was smashed dead there, and no sooner had it died than an entire flock, a cloud, of others descended on him. In a moment he was driven from the lean-to to look for the patch of clay, but though the night was dry enough, the moon was obscured and very little illumination was available. He had put out the fire with water, lest a spark ignite his nearby home while he slept. In the darkness he did not dare go far. He dipped some water from the pond and made ordinary mud from earth and smeared it on his exposed parts. He stuck his trouser ends in the socks and made sure the other garments were buttoned at throat and wrists.

He returned to the lean-to and lay down again on the boughs, but as it dried the mud itched him and kept him from sleeping except in fits and starts, and when his stomach had recovered from the heaves he was hungrier than ever, though not for boiled minnows. He would have sold himself into slavery for a piece of bread—a loaf, a warm loaf, to be torn apart in great chunks, pushed into the mouth, and chewed. A character in a movie did that, but after only a gulp or two forgot about having starved for days, dropped the bread, and went about his business. This was not a French film or, like all the other characters, he would have taken food seriously. With French movies seen in America the subtitles permitted Crews to pretend he understood the dialogue, and everywhere in Paris he and his first wife stayed or ate or bought things, those who served them insisted on replying to Ardis in English, which was not charity but malice. His first wife was too proud to indicate as much to these tourist-spoiled functionaries, she being the sort who got satisfaction from reflecting that they surely did worse to others not fluent in the language, which in fact she was. As Crews was certainly not. But his own pride, though much feebler than hers, was such that he could not come clean on the matter, or in fact on much else. He was capable of admitting to himself that she was brighter than he, but could hardly do so to her, for she would use it against him. The real trouble was that she also had more money than he. They lived in Europe for a while. In the Tyrol, Ardis skied beautifully and he immediately broke his leg and spent the rest of the season at a tavern where expatriates spoke about the other foreign places they had tried and compared Davos with Cortina, St. Moritz with Kitzbühel, Rapallo with Dubrovnik, and Sardinia as opposed to certain little-known isles of Greece. Crews thought he might earn her approbation by mastering German, but of course he did not keep up with his lessons, and anyway Ardis said he spoke like he was chewing excrement. Her foul mouth was incongruous in such a precisely made person, physically incapable of gracelessness. She was a superb horsewoman and as a teenager could have been an Olympian in dressage, but as soon as she was seriously threatened by the possibility of an actual accomplishment, she fled elsewhere, as if in embarrassment with her near failure of taste. They had married young, so young for Crews that he still believed he might eventually do something with himself, like sell wine or high-performance cars. In those days he was relatively sober until nightfall and would even from time to time put in a few teetotaling days to clean out the liver. At just which point Ardis took her first lover he could not have said, but he bore her no ill will for doing so, and in fact he rarely encountered a guy of hers he did not immediately hit it off with.

His own choice of female intimates at that time favored those with jobs but not professions. He was attracted by a young woman who worked at the counter of a bakery until he discovered that with her husband she owned the business, whereas the daughter of an owner might have been okay. He assumed that for a female to be attracted to him, she would have to be a subordinate in her current situation and unfulfilled. He still had some of his own money in those days, but he also still had enough pride not to reflect on such allure as it might be expected to give him. In this he was, uncharacteristically, justified: none of his women ever tried to put the bite on him until the divorce, and then not they but their lawyers were the sharks.

What he saw as his principal appeal was good humor. He embarrassed many a woman, but he tried to avoid quarreling with any. Crews reserved his combative feelings for his fellow man. With women he was agreeable even under adverse conditions. He would rather be abused by a woman than admired by a man, perhaps because men dismissively took him as he was, while women expected something more. At least at first, they believed there was a possibility he would prove capable.

Here in the wilderness he must finally have gone to sleep, for he woke up in daylight, but had no sense of having rested. He drank a lot of water and washed the mud off his face and the backs of his hands. Once again he needed to find food. He had not yet looked for the upstream continuation of the brook that the beavers had dammed to make the pond. He decided to do so now. It was possible he could catch some fish there.

From the tackle case he took some of the little compartmented clear-plastic boxes of artificial flies. He had never yet delved into the depths of the case. He did so now and belatedly discovered, below the plastic boxes, spools of different sorts of line; a scissorslike thing that proved to be tiny forceps; little bottles identified by label as containing dry-fly spray and fly dressing, whatever they might be; a small folder lined with fleece; a miniature reel of measuring tape; and other clips and tabs and gadgets and oddments the purposes of which he could not have known but which seemed infuriatingly useless to a man in his situation … but then a most precious treasure, an extraordinary tool that would answer every need. In his elation he went too far. He had been sick, weak, starving, lost, but with this instrument could prevail over any challenge of the wilderness. It was, in one small unit of stainless steel, a little saw, a knife, and a pair of pliers, to name only the features of obvious value to him. He might have no bottles to open or screws to drive, but simply recognizing the potential for such civilized services was morale-lifting.

He enjoyed a burst of emotion for a few moments and then returned to the level of practicality at which he must live or perish. The tool was six inches long. The saw blade itself, when extended, less than five; the knife, even shorter. It was a happy discovery and would enable him to do more effectively and neatly that which he had done with makeshifts, but the multipurpose gadget was not an ax or a full-sized saw, nor was it a gun.

He returned everything to the tackle case and hung its strap on one shoulder. On the other he slung the tube that contained the segmented rod. He set off on the expedition.

On circling a growth of rushes, he saw what previously he had not: a dome of sticks and mud rising from the water, looking almost man-made. This was surely the beavers’ lodge, a nice piece of construction for a creature without opposable thumbs and no cutting tools but its front teeth. The roof looked impervious to natural enemies, and the entrance apparently was underwater. The animals probably remained there while he was in residence.

He found the stream that fed the pond. It was no more than four feet wide, and, obstructed, it was scarcely swift-running. Owing to the trees that overarched it from both banks, he could not have fished there with a long rod. It was difficult to walk along the right bank, which between the trees was thick with undergrowth, but he persisted, stopping now and again to pluck himself or his gear from the clutch of importunate branches. The other bank looked less overgrown but only slightly so, and he was reluctant to wade across, if only because he was completely dry for the first time in days.

Though the changes of direction were indiscernible as they were happening, the brook obviously bent or even twisted here and there, for the sun was frequently in another part of the sky than where it had been the last time he looked—and then of course the sun itself was in incessant though slow motion. Only now did it occur to him that the sun unassisted could not serve as a reliable directional guide. That it rose in the east and traveled to set in the west was true only in the most general sense. Without better orientation than that, in the absence of any fixed coordinate, you could have no real sense of where you were. He had the courage to make that recognition now, because however crookedly the stream flowed it continued to be the same brook, and so long as he followed its course, he could never be lost—that is, within his immediate area, whatever his situation relative to the greater world. And as long as he knew where he was in this limited way, he was not helpless.

Eventually the line of trees on his side receded from the bank of the stream. The ground was rising. He climbed for a while and reached a sheer rock face, at the foot of which the water ran with such force as to throw up a spray that misted his face as he paused to rest. If this current was not rapid enough for the legendary trout, then there was none such in the universe. He assembled the eight-foot rod. He opened the tackle case. When fishing the lake, he had chosen flies that to him looked realistic, namely the drabbest of the lot, and had not gotten a bite. Now he plucked up the gaudiest he could find in the plastic boxes. Remembering the trouble he had had at the lake in attaching the fly to the thick line, with the knife on his new tool he sliced off a length from a coil of transparent, synthetic twine or thread that for all he knew might well have been designed for the purpose, and knotted one end to the proper line and tied the eye of the fly’s hook onto the other.

He went to the stream at a point at which, having undergone the worst of the turbulence, the water, though still flowing swiftly, was not frenetic. He knew no more of these matters than he ever had, but it simply seemed to him as a fellow creation of God that when swimming full tilt you would not be searching for food, but you might well be in the market for a snack once the going got easier.

He cast the fly as deftly as he could. He had learned something of what seemed the correct technique from his experience at the lake. The fly came down to the water with less force than the line, and the light length of clear plastic made little impact and was almost invisible. The bogus insect with the red midsection, orange mane, and long striped tail floated high in the fast-moving water, but not far. Within six feet of where it had reached the surface, it vanished into the snapping mouth of a sleek fish hitherto unseen in water that though in swirling movement was pellucid.

Crews was unprepared for the speed of this event. He payed out line much too slowly. He had tied the knots to the plastic line not tightly enough: the one attached to the fly instantly unraveled at the onslaught, and the trout, if such it was, disappeared with the imitation insect from which it would get as little nourishment as it would furnish Crews.

At least he had learned that the fanciest of the artificial flies had been good enough to dupe one fish. Now if he could only find its like. He sorted through the segmented boxes and in fact soon found several examples of what seemed to be the same though with slight variations from each to each that owed, presumably, to their being handmade. In addition to those for whom it was a hobby, there were people in the world who tied flies as a profession, as there were those who carved duck decoys and goose calls, and did other things that until only four days earlier he would have thought foolish if he considered them at all.

Since his utter failure in recovering the bodies, he avoided thinking of his late companions with particularity, especially of Dick Spurgeon, the best friend a human being could ever have, for whom in return he himself had been the unworthi-est. The tackle case and rod had belonged to somebody now lost at the bottom of the lake, perhaps Comstock, whose daughter wanted to study art, or Beckman, of whom Crews inexcusably knew next to nothing. Maybe there would be some point to his miserable existence if he survived for no better reason than assuring the families left behind that their men had died as heroes. Dick now had a different wife from the one with whom Crews had had the short-lived liaison that was so loveless for either. It was hardest of all to think of Spurgeon’s two children. In three marriages of his own, Crews had come closest to being a father only with Michelle’s abortion, and surely the world was better for that negative fact, though no doubt he was worse.

He was in no position to surrender to shame. He attached the new fly, with what he meant to be a nonslipping knot, and cast it upon the water. This time, and for a number of repetitions, he had no taker for his bait. Maybe there had been but one trout extant today, and it had painfully learned its lesson. After countless casts, the fly was getting bedraggled, its fuzzier parts soaked, and soon was more in than on the stream. At last he pulled it out and substituted another of the same general type but not quite so colorful.

It was taken immediately. He had no reason to make a sport of it, and quickly jerked the line to set the hook, then with brutal speed, using both hands on the line, yanked the fish from the water with such force that it flew over his head and landed on the boulders behind. The impact was such that the fish was killed. That had not been Crews’s intention, but that it happened was convenient. He brought in the next catch more carefully, which meant he had to kill it or let it pantingly drown in air. The minnows had not bothered him much, simply because they were so small. There was a morality for you, one founded on inches and ounces. But you had to admit it was only human to stride nonchalantly over a colony of ants while deploring the vivisection of mammals. Spraying fur coats with red paint while they were being worn: though she had not yet done it herself, his third wife approved of the practice. They never quarreled about such things, though he had not shared her zeal and when not in her company heedlessly ate meat. Molly stuck to her principles. She turned down more than one job on discovering that the prospective clients wore mink, and then there were the woman who asked her to upholster a chair in unborn calf and the man who wanted the walls of his study covered with zebra skin.

Crews kept fishing until he had a half-dozen of the lovely speckled fish that were presumably trout, though of another breed than he could remember eating in restaurants. His immediate hunger could no longer be denied. He had tucked the magnifying mirror into the tackle case before starting out. He removed it now and, having collected tinder and heartier fuel among the desiccated driftwood flung up onto the rocks by bygone floods, quickly made a fire during the brief period the sun moved between two high, feather-pillowy clouds. He was getting good at the trick.

The variegated, iridescent beauty of the trout as they had come from the water was fading in death. With his new knife he slit one from gills to tail and cleaned out the innards. Then he strung it lengthwise on a long green stick. He slowly turned it over the flames. The stick quickly dried and caught fire from time to time, and despite his care in turning the spit, the fish was charred in one place and almost raw in others, for the flames were too high and he was impatient. But when eaten the trout was no less than glorious. He burned his fingers and tongue during the meal but checked his impulse to gulp without chewing.

He was able to limit himself to only two fish. These examples were six or seven inches long and, smoked, would have served only as appetizers back in civilization. But however ravenous, he could not afford again to abuse his system as he had by bolting down the minnows. Smoking would seem the best means to deal with the remaining fish. There was a generous choice of stones along the banks of the stream. He was able to find just what he needed for a frame around the fire, now reduced to embers much hotter than the preceding flames on which he had impatiently burned his meal.

He went downstream to a point at which the cliff declined to a grade which he could conveniently climb to reach green foliage. He brought back an armload of fresh pine boughs. These went onto the hot coals within the circle of rocks, across which he placed the four cleaned fish, spitted on green twigs. Soon they were bathed in dense smoke. He hoped that while preserving the trout he was also sending into the sky an unmistakable signal that a human being was in the forest below. But the brisk currents of air that flowed down the stone face of the cliff dissipated his hopes along with the smoke.

Leaving the trout in their fragrant fumes, Crews explored upstream, proceeding gingerly because only rocks were underfoot here, some with sharp edges against his unprotected soles. He came to a place at which the cliff had been divided as if with a giant wedge. Between the halves was a notch, stony but with enough vegetation to make a climb possible, and he undertook the ascent, which once underway proved much more demanding than it had looked from below. When he finally toiled onto the summit he found himself within the grove of tall pines that had been visible all the while but which he had failed to evaluate. To see beyond, he would have to climb one of them. He had not been in a tree as an adult. The task was not only physically taxing but so scary in the upper reaches of the ascent that subsequently coming down would be unthinkable. Therefore he did not think, and so managed to reach the topmost branch thick enough to bear his weight, and from which he saw a universe of unbroken green, except for the visible portion of the blue lake, from where he was to the horizon on a circuit of 360 degrees.

He successfully came down from the tree, a task not so forbidding as the anticipation of it had been, and then descended the cliff, of which the reverse was true, and finally returned downstream to the fire, which was no longer smoking. The trout had turned to brittle leather—but in fact when tasted were exquisitely tender inside the crackling carapace. Not only was it tastier than the fish he had cooked so badly at lunch, but with their smoke the boughs had supplied additional flavor, in which even the welcome illusion of salt was included.

He placed the three remaining smoked fish in plastic bags from which he had emptied the previous contents and stowed them in the tackle case, slinging it across his chest on the strap. Crossing that was the strap of the cylinder that carried the disassembled rod. All was neatly packaged on his person, and he was refreshed by the meal, though hardly stuffed. He looked forward to getting home, eating the rest of his food, and working either on a pair of shoes in which to hike out of the wilderness or on the improvement of the lean-to.

Now he knew where fish could be caught. Next time he would arrive earlier and stay longer, catching enough trout for the smoking of a portable supply of nourishment that could sustain him on a long walk to civilization. He had already learned how difficult it was to live off the land. He would pack enough smoked fish to live on even if he found nothing else to eat en route. Any fresh food he did find he would use immediately, reserving what he carried for emergencies.

He hiked back home through the failing light, and while once again the distance traveled seemed greater than the route out, it was a breezily clear evening, and having his neat shelter to look forward to, with the remaining smoked trout as either bedtime snack or a breakfast to anticipate, he felt, of all things, an impulse to whistle. For an instant he was shocked by this urge, which seemed almost rude. He was an intruder here. He who had made a social career of being offensive now worried about behaving improperly in a milieu of plants and animals. That was good for a laugh, but not having laughed in so long a time, he found an example hard to produce. What emerged was rather a croak, appropriate enough on nearing the pond, where the night before the sounds of the resident frogs had contributed to the din that, with the mosquito attacks, had kept him awake. In answer now he heard a couple of plops, the first evidence of the beavers since he had moved onto their turf. The animals had been lying low throughout his lean-to building, minnow seining, and other activities, but felt free to get back to normal when he was gone all day.

It was great to get home. Simply to see and touch the few of his possessions he had not worn or carried on the fishing trip was reassuring. He unslung the rod and tackle cases and stowed them in their places at one end of the structure. At the other end, as pillow, he put the duffel bag that contained such clothes as he was not wearing.

He was not quite ready to retire, but neither had he sufficient remaining energy to deal with the bed of boughs that had been so uncomfortable the night before. He sat down on one of the nearby stumps and ate a smoked trout, slowly, savoring every morsel, including the now brittle brush of tail, and when he was done, he proceeded to eat the other two fish as well, though not with unalloyed satisfaction: thinking of the bear, he believed he was safest when he kept no food on hand to attract the animal. This consideration added a problem to the matter of accumulating enough smoked trout to sustain him on the projected hike out of the wilderness. He was too tired to think further on that subject or any other. He put on an extra shirt against the expected chill of the night and lay down in the lean-to, on the boughs, and immediately went to sleep, disregarding the possibility of a renewed attack by mosquitoes.

Whether or not any marauder visited him during the night, four-footed or winged, he woke in the morning without evidence of having been molested. No doubt the breeze had kept the mosquitoes away. It had chilled him somewhat, as he could remember as if from a dream, but not so painfully as to have brought him to full consciousness. He had nothing on which to breakfast, but he was learning to accept an animal-like way of life in which you ate when you could and kept going until you found the next meal.

Yet he must resist a similar state of mind regarding his predicament in general. There could be no further postponement in drawing up a comprehensive plan of action that would take account of his needs and his aims, along with the possibilities of successfully addressing both. The needs took precedence, but he had made a good start with food and shelter. No doubt he could better his previous performances in both areas, especially if he decided to stay in place until he was found. He had not been effective in signaling to aircraft, but not for want of trying. It was hard to say what else could be done. Keeping a fire burning at all times, so that at the first sound of an engine damp wood could be hurled onto the flames, would be impracticable. Touching off a forest fire would presumably bring attention but with a sudden change of wind the fire might eliminate the need for rescue by burning him alive.

He had to be frank with himself: he did not believe he would ever be rescued if he remained where he was. At the same time, and despite the discouraging panorama of unrelieved forest from the top of the pine, he was convinced that, with protection for his feet—or even, if they continued to toughen up, without—he could walk back to human society.

He was therefore startled when he asked himself which he really wanted to do, stay or go, and could not for an instant give a hearty or even an honest answer. But the moment was soon gone, and he began seriously to plan for the hike.

For the smoking of a supply of fish, he found a number of robust stones and from them built a larger and sturdier version of the simple arrangement he had used alongside the trout stream, and gathered the dry makings for the fire to come. He cut green twigs for the spits and fresh boughs from which to make smoke. He traveled upstream to the place where he had caught the trout the day before and, after having no success now with several of the gaudier flies, tried the drabbest, and caught one fish after another.

He had a good day, returning with ten trout. He had taken care to clean them on the spot and not back at the pond, where the offal might attract unwelcome visitors. After the preliminaries, he put the fish on to smoke and attended to the business of making sandals. The knife on the newly discovered tool made an easy job of cutting the birch bark to size, and the little auger head on another of the blades effectively pierced holes around the margins of the soles, for the thread that would lash them to the socks. As thread he had a choice of those spools of synthetic line from the tackle case. He took the finest, which still was stiff enough not to require a needle.

He had weighted down the bark under heavy stones for more than a day, but since it nevertheless retained a stubborn tendency to curl, he heated water again in a container made of the same material and straightened the soles-to-be in the steam therefrom. He sewed them onto a pair of socks. The result was close to what he had projected. He could walk in or on what he made, and even more comfortably if wearing them over a second pair of socks. How long the bark would stand up to the wear and tear of a long hike was another matter. Therefore he cut out and perforated two pairs of replacements that could quickly be stitched on if needed, without stopping at the nearest birch.

To sustain him in his labors, he ate two of the trout after they were cooked through but not yet fully smoked. This food tasted even more delicious than it had the day before, and he was again warmed with that rarest of feelings for him: a well-being not simply physical but moral as well. Food, when he could get it, was now his sole indulgence. It did for his spirit what, way back before alcohol became a way of life, the first drink of the evening had done. At first, the latter had been beer, usually taken at the college-town tavern with the scarred tables and fellow students who waited on them with more apparent care and less efficiency than the professionals of cities.

He was suddenly too hungry to restrain himself from eating another of the trout and another after that, which left only six on which to make the hike. On the other hand, he might reach civilization much sooner than it would seem from the pine-top view. How far could one see from such a height, anyway? Even if as much as twenty miles, he could surely walk that in less than a day. He dismissed the consideration that twenty miles would not necessarily bring him to civilization, and he ate still another of the fish, reducing his supply by half: he was well aware of that fact, but he was hungrier now than when he had eaten the third. He made a heroic effort to stop at that point, more than he had done with the drinking. The fact was that he had always been at a loss with women when cold sober. He had noticed this girl, a waitress, before Spurgeon had. It was he who had brought her to Spurgeon’s attention: that’s what hurt.

“You don’t mean the little redhead? I hope you know she’s married to a campus cop.”

Crews grimaced. “Of course I don’t mean Ewie. This one’s new. She’s kinda short and round. I don’t mean fat. I should have said a round, sweet face, long dark hair, round eyes.”

“I don’t look at her that much,” said Spurgeon. “I don’t like real pale skin with freckles, or old women, or ones married to local guys.”

Spurgeon’s way was always to resist whatever he was told, even when it was totally banal—Rainy? What does “rainy” mean exactly: raining? About to rain? Just got done? How much more tiresome he was then, if the subject at hand was the opposite sex.

“Evvie’s no more than twenty-five or -six, for God’s sake, your sister’s age.”

“You want my sister,” Spurgeon said gleefully, extending a hand and rubbing two fingertips together, “you got to go through me, and it won’t be cheap.”

Crews shrugged but was actually offended by that sort of joking. Spurgeon’s sister, Dee, was a motherly sort of young woman who had seemed older than she was until, paradoxically, she became pregnant. She was married to a man with a small office-supply business that Dick predicted would go nowhere. Already, as a college sophomore, he considered himself an authority on commerce, and in fact time had not long afterward proved him right. It was no doubt due to the same sort of ego that he was fearless with girls.

“Look,” Crews told him, “don’t make too much of it. I just noticed she was new. I just wondered if you had seen her.”

Spurgeon tossed his head, his signal for an assertion of moral superiority. “I can’t afford to hang out that much at the Hole.” He was at college on a scholarship from some fraternal organization to which his father, a municipal employee in a middle-sized city, belonged, and Dick worked at full-time jobs every summer. He was not exactly poor, though it was true he did not have Crews’s allowance. Nevertheless it was snide of him never to miss an opportunity to remind the latter of the financial difference between them.

… Crews could see no advantage in this reminiscence. He was beset by practical problems, and reliving old experiences that would only make him feel more inadequate could serve no purpose. As it happened, he had eaten more of the smoked fish while so distracted. Now his supply had dwindled to three: obviously he could not travel far on those. Also he was beginning to worry that he had overeaten again. He was so worried, indeed, that to calm himself he ate one of the remaining trout.

Dick Spurgeon could not afford to hang out at Cal Cutter’s, immemorially known as the Black Hole, yet he went there immediately on hearing of his roommate’s interest in the new waitress and not only struck up a conversation with her, but proceeded to date her “incessantly,” he claimed, for a week. He even professed to have fallen in love, piously assuring Crews, “And you know, I don’t say that lightly.”

“Because,” Spurgeon said, with a smile he believed “debonair”—another of his favorite terms at that time was “lugubrious,” and he really misused both—“you brought us together.”

“Come on,” said Spurgeon. “I’m serious. You know there is such a thing as love. It’s not all just sex.”

“Well, you do now.” Spurgeon’s indignation was tongue-in-cheek. He could not possibly have any deep emotion about Nina. He was incapable of genuine feeling with regard to anything but his intention to become a millionaire by the age of twenty-five. Since he would not get his B.S. until he was almost twenty-two, he decided not to waste still another year on an M.B.A. In fact, as a sophomore he had begun to doubt whether even completing the undergraduate program was the best he could do with that time. His favorite mode of operation, at least in theory, was the bold move. No doubt he had put it into practice with Nina.

Crews thought her common, had no further interest in her, hated to hear her name on Spurgeon’s lips. “I wish you every happiness together,” he said.

“You’re jealous,” said Spurgeon, grinning into his face. “You saw her first, and could have made your play. But you didn’t. She can’t even remember seeing you.”

Crews had met Nina once in Spurgeon’s company, but as briefly as possible. For that matter, he was pleased she had not noticed him earlier. “You’re having delusions of grandeur. I made some slight mention of this new girl at the Hole. I didn’t have any reason to speak to her. You’re with her now, that’s great by me. I’ve got nothing against her. She’s okay-looking and, you say, very nice. Congratulations.”

Crews got drunk for the first time, alone at home, except for a maid in a distant room, when he was twelve, trying to determine for himself what was so great about the wine given his father that Christmas by a client. Having neatly slit and withdrawn the lead-foil cap, he removed the cork without deforming it much with the screw. With the first few sips the wine was wretchedly sour, another of the unpleasant things adults ingested, but improved somewhat when he persisted, though it never got what could be called good. He drank about a third of the bottle, then brought its contents up to the original level by the introduction of tap water, pounded the cork home with the heel of a shoe, and reapplied the lead cap. He returned the bottle to its horizontal diamond-shaped bin in the wine cellar, taking care to lift as many of the other bottles as was necessary to fit his in bottommost, where, if what his father said was true, it would acquire many years of precious aging before being tasted by anyone else. Maybe by the time it was finally opened, the water he had added would have turned to wine. In any event, he was under the influence, legs wobbly and brain and face overheated, and while he did not get legendarily sick to the stomach, he did not care for the feeling he had, went to sleep as if anesthetized, and woke up with a taste in the mouth that reminded him of how mildew smelled.

He had got used to the feeling in the years since, though only sporadically, in company, and usually on beer, the taste of which he genuinely came to like in those days, as opposed to that of most wines. The feeling he could take or leave. With such moderate examples of it, he was well aware that the heightened powers furnished thereby were illusory. One could not do more push-ups when drunk than when sober, nor better understand texts in philosophy or French. You might seem wittier when drunk, but perhaps only to those themselves full of alcohol—judging from the drunks encountered when you yourself were sober.

It was at the Hole that he first drank so much as to alter his behavior in a basic way. He had thought he was sincere in assuring Spurgeon of his indifference in the matter regarding Nina, but he had lied to himself, as he discovered with enough vodka in him, which he had switched to because the amount of beer needed would have made him bilious. Though there could be no sane reason to resent her having failed to notice him while running burgers to a clamorous roomful of people, when his table was not even among those she served, she could not be forgiven for her interest in Spurgeon, which would have been inexplicable to Crews even if he had never previously laid eyes on her, unless of course she was simply a prostitute.

It would not have been so bad if Spurgeon had just gone for tail. But no, he always had to be in love with whomever he went out with at the moment. Crews despised that kind of falsity, that vulgarity, but then his roommate (for the second year) was just a cheap little bastard (though physically larger than Crews): what else was new? It could also be said that Spurgeon’s basic trashiness was what made him a more respectable roommate than a finer sort of person would have been, if one even knew what a finer sort would consist of.

On the evening in question, Spurgeon having been called home for what well might be his father’s last few days of life following a massive heart attack, Crews stayed at the Hole, drinking, until Nina finished her shift at nine, when the kitchen closed. Once again she had not noticed him, and again reasonably enough, for he sat at the remotest end of the bar, on a stool that tried to trip him up when he finally left it, hurriedly, so as to get outside and pretend to be strolling by the rear door at the moment she made her exit.

The first embarrassment was when the bartender yelled at his back, in loud and brutal tones. He had not paid his tab. By the time he had done so and returned outside, Nina’s neat figure was halfway down the block on the side street, walking with a rapid, staunch stride that was not easy to overtake on legs such as his. Not to mention that when not directly under a streetlamp, she was invisible to him and also unheard, on soundless shoes. The whole thing seemed like a dream. He had never been so drunk before.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said when he at last caught up, in one of the circles of light, which embraced a street corner, the curb, and below it the grating of a storm drain.

“You didn’t,” said she, with a quizzical forehead: he could see that through his personal mist.

“Guess we’re going the same way.” In case his pronunciation showed the effects of his drinking, he said, “I had a few. But I’m okay.”

What was important here was her offering to associate herself with him. She could simply have suggested he get the coffee by himself. He had had no such expectation. He was touched and became somewhat soberer. “I’ll sleep it off,” he said. “Coffee would just keep me awake.” They started to walk. He tried to keep from lurching against her.

He mumbled something about Spurgeon’s father, though whether clearly enough for her to understand was questionable. He had shaken the man’s hand once during the two years he and Dick had been roommates. Spurgeon had never met Crews’s own father. Nor did the roommates entertain each other at their respective homes on vacations. Undoubtedly Spurgeon believed his own was too humble.

Despite the care he was taking, Crews’s equilibrium slipped away for a moment and, seeking it, he bumped against the side of Nina’s body. She was very firm, and the slight collision did not seem to affect her, so he checked his impulse to apologize and thus call attention to an inadequacy. Instead he thought of something to say.

“That’s nice,” said Nina in a tone that told Crews that because he had bumped her she believed he was drunk and would henceforth address him only disingenuously. Nevertheless, he went on. “It’s my ambition to do worse than mine.”

He lied, “I’m just kidding.” They were already at another corner, and he had to take care that he was ready for the step down from the curb. He was too deliberate about it and once again only called her attention to his state.

“Do you really know where you’re headed?” Nina asked. “If it’s home, you can’t get there in this direction.”

“I live right up there.” She pointed along the street. This was a murky block of big old houses, most of which were now dark. He had never been in the area before and was totally disoriented now, with no sense whatever of its relation to where he lived.

“I get a better deal here,” Nina said. “It’s just the room rent. I eat free at Cutter’s: that’s a big part of the pay.”

“You get paid in food?” He felt so sorry for her that he could have wept, or so it seemed.

“Wait a minute,” said she. “Plus minimum. That’s not bad, considering what the lousy dorm food costs per year. Then there are tips. Not all the kids understand that and don’t leave much, if any, but others do.”

Crews felt guilty. Such places seemed quite different from bars and restaurants that did not cater to college students, and he himself was probably not as generous with tips as he would be elsewhere. Furthermore, he had never before understood that a student waitress might seriously need the money and not be working as a kind of hobby. Crews had a checking account into which ample funds were regularly deposited by his father’s secretary. Beginning this year, he and Spurgeon shared a two-bedroom apartment in town, to the rent of which Dick contributed only what he would have paid in a university dormitory, and Crews picked up the remainder.

“Listen,” Nina said, touching his arm at the crook of the elbow, “why don’t I walk you home? You probably have to cross Broad Street. They really race along there.”

She was concerned for his welfare! They had stopped before a large gloomy old house with a veranda. “Is this where you live?” He was aware that he had not responded to her offer, and he did so now. “I’ll be all right, thanks.” He pointed at the veranda. “Maybe if I sit down for a minute.”

“Okay,” said Nina. “But only a minute, please. I’ve still got reading to do and an early class tomorrow. And please keep your voice down. I don’t want to wake anybody up.” She leaned close to him to say this quietly, and her breath was warm and sweet. No artifice had gone into her making. Her hair was long and sleek and parted in the middle; she tied it behind when waiting on tables, but now it hung free. Her face was round, almost broad, yet fine in its particulars, with soft eyebrows and lacy lashes.

They sat down on a white wicker couch, the cushions of which were covered in flowered vinyl. Visibility was good, owing to the presence of a streetlamp at the curb. He understood that Nina was speaking in an undertone because she did not want to disturb the people in the house, not because she had an intimate interest in him. He understood that, but the alcohol gave him the power to alter reality and transform situations and persons into what he wanted them to be. He stayed where he was, in the corner of the wicker couch, and spoke in a whisper, forcing her to lean toward him.

“You should know this,” he said. “I was the one who noticed you first at Cutter’s, not Dick. He looked you up only because I mentioned you. He wanted to score some points off me.”

What he could see of her expression was inscrutable. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m crazy about you,” he said, with an exaggeration that did not seem such in his state, for his voice was dispassionate insofar as he could judge. She remained inscrutable. He added, “I think about you all the time. It’s not right.”

“It’s not right that you don’t, didn’t, know about it.” He altered his position so that his shoulder was not as close to hers.

“I just wish I knew what it meant, though,” she said solemnly, as if to herself. “You mean you want to go to bed with me? Is that it?”

He was both offended and eroticized by this question. Aroused for obvious reasons, but offended because he had no better idea of what he meant than she. Actually, until now he had never thought of her in a physical way. Pawing her breasts, getting her underwear off, and the rest: the subject was embarrassing. Such sex as Crews had had thus far in life had been just for pleasure, with prostitutes or fun-loving amateurs, not tainted by emotion. However, he was now on an exalted plane of existence. He could do as he wished without restraint. He was willing to participate in some sex, if that’s what she was suggesting, and afterward consider what effect it had, if any, on his attachment to her.

“Look,” he said. “It would be all right with me, if that’s what you are saying.”

“No, I wasn’t saying that. I was just trying to figure out what you mean, because it just seems crazy. You drink too much, then run into me, and we don’t even know each other, and yet you’re all of a sudden crazy about me? Does that make any sense at all?”

It was not that you didn’t know what you were doing when drunk: you did, and never more than when acting as you would not have done if sober. The difference was that when drunk you expected either to triumph or not be held accountable for failure.

“You probably aren’t aware,” he said now, “that I could do a lot more for you than Dick can. You wouldn’t have to work at that damned job. Money’s no problem.”

Nina stared at him for a long moment, but not in apparent hostility, for she seemed to be smiling, though her face was at an angle to the light from the streetlamp and the resulting shadow of nose and elongation of nose might have misrepresented the expression. In the early years of drinking, Crews could sometimes be an overprecise observer of minutiae that yielded little on analysis, as here. It mattered not at all whether she displayed amiability. She despised him.

Perhaps he should have denied the implication vociferously, but instead he defended the offer. “Why should you run your legs off serving beer? My father makes all kinds of money representing mobsters. Why not give some of it to a good cause?”

Nina was shaking her head. “Maybe it was somebody who asked me some directions.”

Crews was in no condition to react swiftly. Instead, he said reasonably, “I guess that’s where I saw you two.”

Nina said, “I’ve seen you once or twice at Cutter’s, haven’t I? So many people come in there.” She stood up and smiled down at him, assuming much the same attitude that she displayed as waitress. “So you were trying to cut out your friend? Was it some kind of bet or something?”

Crews realized that to make his point he too should leave the couch, but the fact was that his legs refused to move on command. “The hell with that,” he cried, abandoning the undertone. “None of that stuff matters. You belong to me!”

“Now you’re getting out of order,” she said, extending her hand. “And shut up before you wake somebody.” She was very strong. When he clasped her fingers, she pulled him to his feet without evident effort. “Go home and sober up.”

Crews took his hand back when he had found his balance, and supported himself by a knee against the wicker armrest of the couch. “I apologize,” he said. “It was not my intention to insult you.”

Perhaps his tone was more plaintive than he knew. She touched his arm. “No harm done. You’re not the world’s worst.”

He was dizzy, but he rallied. “I won’t bother you any more: you can count on that.” He tried to leave but was so wobbly he paused before undertaking the steep wooden steps.

She was there, restraining him at the elbow. “You can’t go home like that.” She took him to the door, unlocked it with a key that hung from the chain she took from around her neck, and guided him into the darkened house. The door of her room was at the end of a hall of which he was only dimly aware, but she moved confidently along it, as if it were brightly lighted. In the room, she switched on a lamp, the sudden radiance of which he found too much, and he averted his head. She sat him down on the bed.

“You can sleep there if you take off your shoes.” She looked at him for a moment and added, “I don’t want it wet, either. The bathroom’s right across the hall. I’ll leave my door open so you can see the way there.”

In the bathroom, having no faith in his ability to shoot straight from that far away, Crews sat down on the toilet to pee, facing the raised seat. Back in Nina’s room, he saw she had replaced her clothing with a long robe of white terry cloth.

“I’ll curl up in this chair,” said she, patting its shabby upholstery, and told him again to remove his shoes.

“Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “I’m turning the light off now. Good night.”

Next day he woke up and saw by the black-faced alarm clock on the bedside table that the time was within five minutes of noon. When he bent over to put on his shoes he found a note in one of them.

Lock the door from inside when you are ready to leave and just pull it shut. Don’t do this though if you just go to the bathroom and want to come back, or it will lock.

After his performance there was no reason to expect she would express any endearment even of the ritualistic, insignificant kind. He was cold sober again, but remembered every moment of the evening before. Spurgeon had duped him completely, and he had all but disgraced himself. Obviously he could not endure the idea that Nina would ever see him again even at a distance. The Hole was off limits forever. But he could not let it go at that.

Spurgeon was home when he returned. “Jesus, I was about ready to call the police. I got back at ten last night. Dad was out of danger, so I came back for the econ test this morning. What happened to you? You look like shit.”

“I spent the night with your fiancée,” Crews said, pushing a jaw at him. “Got some objection to that?”

Still grinning, Spurgeon asked, “Don’t you think I could do better than that?” He was gloating, his victory having been much more sweeping than he had obviously expected.

Crews thought of punching him, but being out of shape and also in a debilitating moral confusion—whom would he be defending, Nina or himself?—he went to take a shower.

As if in a diabolical hurry to consolidate his defeat, he was often drunk after that. He could not keep his vow never to visit the Hole again, until, after one of his many quarrels with the bartender, the police enforced it for him. He came to the verge of flunking out in the same semester and so alienated his adviser that he was urged to leave college, which, typically, was the only advice he ever took, but not before making one more effort to avenge himself on Spurgeon, by offering to pay the apartment rent for the rest of the term.

“How could I let you do that?” Dick asked, as if in genuine indignation. “If you’re not going to be here?” Within a few days he had arranged a proctorship for the semester soon to begin, which came with a free room, in fact a suite, in one of the better dorms.

The truth was that Crews was liable for the entire semester’s rent anyway, unless he found a tenant to replace him. He thought about prepaying the rent in a lump sum, which would take no more trouble than giving his father’s secretary a call, and then turning the apartment over to Nina, in some remote way, never seeing her again. But even sincere generosity had now begun to seem false to him, at least in his conception of it, and he left the college town without doing anything at all, counting on the confiscating of the two months’ security deposit to satisfy the landlord. It did not, but his father took care of the matter.

To Nina he had been nobody at all. Yet he had loved her all these years, and was wont to believe, in his weakest moments, that she could have straightened him out. Not until now, truly on his own for the first time in a life in which his excuse had ever been that he was always alone even in a crowd, did he understand that he had been no less to Nina than she had been to him. He had never even learned her last name. She had been nothing to him but a pretext. But in so being she was not even unique.

5